


Ode to teenage godhood

by ghostgirlintraining



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 15:54:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29778540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostgirlintraining/pseuds/ghostgirlintraining
Summary: Joseph Kavinsky was a god in his own right. Covered in war paint and cast from the heavens, he laughed as he burned through the sky.But what is a god without followers?AKA A short piece on Kavinsky and his boys
Kudos: 5





	Ode to teenage godhood

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by @brophigenia's characterizations of the dream pack

Joseph Kavinsky was a god in his own right. Covered in war paint and cast from the heavens, he laughed as he burned through the sky. 

But what is a god without followers?

He’d set his eyes upon an empire and refused to settle for anything less. And so, he set about gathering his knights like hapless child would choose rocks from a stream; one by one, and mostly by accident.  
-  
Prokopenko was his first. He was there in the beginning and he would be there at the end, forever standing just enough behind Kavinsky, whispering wild thoughts of menace and chaos to fuel the insanities he relentlessly pulled from his skull. His thin and forever shaking fingers caressed Kavinsky’s body in dark corners where not even God could make out where Kavinsky ended and Prokopenko began.

When Prokopenko died in an underwhelmingly ordinary car crash, Kavinsky blamed the softer parts of Prokopneko for the reason his body no longer held breath. So, when he brought him back, he brought him back meaner.

Whispers turned to hisses of scheming, of dark plans not yet formed, but still undeniably terrifying. Caresses turned to bites and scratches, forever grappling, as if the new Prokopenko was trying to get back into K’s head where he belonged. His kisses had more bite, his gaze more weight, and Kavinsky often idly wondered if this was an improvement or a perversion of what Ilya Prokopenko once was.   
-  
Jiang was the second. He never hesitated to speak out against K, or just straight up insult him to his face, but his loyalty was unshakable and the depths he would go to for Kavinsky was impressive enough to gain begrudging admiration from even the most tight-jawed of Kavinsky’s adversaries. 

When Kavinsky brought back a six pack of beer from his dreams, Jiang had laughed and called him a god. When Kavinsky brought back Prokopenko from the dead, Jiang had started to believe that maybe he was.

Jiang was one of few words, he sharpened his knifes as he sharpened his tongue, and used both with the utmost discression. An unforgiving hunger lingered beneath his skin, and it pleased Kavinsky to no end when it reared its ugly head. Bloody teeth and bruised knuckles were the only type of offerings Jiang presented to Kavinsky as thanks for allowing him to tap into his most shameful desires.

He had always felt like a wild dog on a leash, stretching at his reigns, wanting, begging to chase, to hunt, to kill. He had cut his leash by force once before, and had willing handed its frayed remains to Kavinsky, the first person to recognise the darkness in him, and accept him, not in spite of it, but because of it.  
-  
Swan was the third. He had been a prince since birth. As one of the five heirs to the second biggest black-market trading conglomerate, he had been raised to rule from the shadows. His compassion had been all but beaten out of him, his heart turn to steel. However, his pride had been his downfall in the end. Lax judgment led to accidents, led to murder, led to his crown to be ripped from him, his birth right cast to someone his father deemed ‘more suited’, more worthy. He was cast out of Britain and left to roam in the teeming streets of America, where his name meant nothing. 

A wandering prince without a throne to sit on, Swan found solace in the dysfunctional brotherhood of Joseph Kavinsky’s followers. He was content to sit back and watch as they ran screaming through the world, to become a rock, a focal point for them to come back to when they wore themselves out on their rampages. 

He made himself a new home within them. One he carved himself, one that felt earned, and not handed to him on a tray off the backs of those that came before him. This was his. They were reckless and self-destructive, and he loved them with every fibre of his being. He alone stroked Kavinsky’s head when his night terrors threatened to kill him, and pretended like he didn’t hear him crying. 

He was a vault of their secrets and desires, a monument to the shadows of their souls.   
-  
Skov was the last. He came to Kavinsky of his own volition, after seeing him bathed in the bonfires he’d set at one of his substance parties, silhouetting his head like a heathen’s halo, burning defiantly in the darkness.

His love for K was akin to that of worship, and Kavinsky bathed in the light that Skov deigned to shine on him. He brought him gifts of gold and precious stones, and though Kavinsky could bring replicas ten times more opulent from his head when he was half lucid, he wore every gift Skov ever gave him with befitting arrogance.

Skov, once a spry gem of the sweltering LA coastline, tan, loud and wanted by everyone who mattered, coming to rest on his knees before an eighteen-year-old god was funny enough to make himself laugh when he was alone. He had once considered himself a god too, of revelry and sin, accepting offerings of wet open mouths in dark parking lots, of wine, vodka and limitless opportunities gifted by those who were desperate to fuck him.

He’d lost his neon-branded godhood as quick as he had risen to it, when his mother decided to ship him off to boarding school, where he met a new kind of god. Old, powerful and beyond his comprehension. 

Of course he worshipped Kavinsky.  
Who wouldn’t?  
-  
Kavinsky rewarded their piety by carving his initial into their skin so the world would know that they were his, and in a way, he was theirs too. Bite marks and scratches heal and fade, but ink would stay forever, binding them permanently to him in a pact unbreakable, even by death.

When the red tipped flames of his dream dragon stroked Kavinsky’s skin as his creation flew through him, he laughed at the onlookers who feared this was where he would end.

And his pack laughed with him, because they knew it would take more than fire to kill a god.


End file.
